I was a bit baffled by Sony's presentation but I have to admit that the SSD tech definitely sounds like a game changer in the way game worlds can be realized and how we move around in them. However, if developers would fully embrace the tech and build their whole games around it, how will that work on Series X and how about pc?

I think third party devs will use the lowest common denominator for the consoles. So most likely, most third party games will be limiting to the performance of the XSX SSD assuming the rumoured XSS isn't slower. Ps5 will still have some advantages even then when it comes to loading and etc but I think most third party games won't take full advantage of that SSD in terms of developing around it.

As for PC. I think soon enough, PC gamers that are still using Sata based hard drive or SSD will need to upgrade to Nvme otherwise they are gonna see hitching and stuttering. Similar to if you look at the Fallen Order performance between hard drives on consoles and SSDs on PC. I think (but I could be wrong) there are a good amount of Nvme drives out right now that can probably handle XsX's SSD speeds like the 970 Evo.

PC can already leverage the SSD in a way that is efficient, but it could mean that RAM + SSD (NVMe) will play nicer together on properly built, high-end rigs. Otherwise, it took a PC to implement that PS5 tech, so it won't change things too much.

I really hope the SSD isnt clung to as tightly as the CELL was. PS5 is focused more on utility where as Series X is raw power. Both should end up being pretty similar in performance and game design. The multiplats will be the true comparisons.

sales2099 said:I really hope the SSD isn’t clung to as tightly as the CELL was. PS5 is focused more on utility where as Series X is raw power. Both should end up being pretty similar in performance and game design. The multiplats will be the true comparisons.

Actually, both are dealing with raw power, the Series X just has more of it. I expect the games to be a lot closer than people think, because the leverage the PS5's SSD will provide isn't be taken serious enough. The hardware in it is more exotic (yes, Sony has somewhat returned to this), but it's still in tune with what developers requested. I prefer it, because as the underdog, they'll put that much more into their exclusives, which on consoles, I expect to dominate visually.

Also, with SSD vs Cell — two completely different things (the analogy doesn't work). If nothing else, 'teh Cell' is more like those lovely teraflops that many of you like to tout, but it was only ever taken full advantage of by in-house developers (and you will never truly know what that teraflop number means in regards to your games). This will not be that, as the PS5 is still built far more conventionally (certainly more than the complete exotic anatomy of the PS3).

So, as I always advise, look at the real meat of both systems. There's less than a 20% difference in raw power and plenty of raw power to satisfy the needs of both platforms.

I was a bit baffled by Sony's presentation but I have to admit that the SSD tech definitely sounds like a game changer in the way game worlds can be realized and how we move around in them. However, if developers would fully embrace the tech and build their whole games around it, how will that work on Series X and how about pc?

We do not know.

What people don't seem to understand is what was actually solved by Sony. Whether Sony spent too much money on this (and sound hardware) and sort of forgot the rest (I'm not happy at all about the memory bandwith, for example), only time will tell. Here it gets very technical, but the short version of it is: Sony can stream into gpu memory space with gpu cache coherency, and do this at very high speeds. No ssd/pc combination in the world can do this. Yes, there are very fast ssds available for pcs, but they all stream into cpu memory! The XSX also streams into gpu memory space (not quite at the high speeds as the PS5), but MS has not explained how they solve the problems associated with that. The cache scrubber (and possibly whatever is in the Kraken hardware) is proprietary to Sony, so MS doesn't have that.

I remember a demo of AssCreed where the guy runs through a crowd. Often people and stuff appeared out of nowhere (what is called popup). The faster the guy ran, the more popups, very annoying to watch.

Now on the PS5, these popups are entirely gone if you program your stuff "the correct way". Even when you turn around your warrior and s/he looks elsewhere and a whole new lot of assets have to be loaded - no popups. That situation can easily get completely out of hand when you use ray tracing in building your scenery, as your gpu caches might no longer contain large parts of the correct scenery.

The games will show us the truth. I imagine that a game tailormade for the PS5 will run atrociously on a pc, if it is a simple port to the pc (whatever that means). What the XSX does with such a game is anyone's guess at this time of (not) knowing the intrinsics of the gpu hardware, but I can imagine it will require some additional work to "get it right", a simple compiler flag setting won't do the job.